The Unsorted BBS Collection/thegreatunsorted.tar/thegreatunsorted/texts/boxes/sotlbb1.txt

Text File | 1991-02-05 | 16KB | 284 lines

Secrets of The Little Blue Box Pt.1

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"A Story so incredible it may even make
 you feel sorry for the phone company."
 From October 1971 Esquire Magazine
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THE BLUE BOX IS INTRODUCED: IT'S QUALITIES ARE REMARKED

I am in the expensively furnished living room of Al Gilbertson, (his real
name has been changed) the creator of the "blue box."  Gilbertson is holding
one of his shiny black-and-silver "blue boxes" comfortably in the palm of his
hand, pointing out the thirteen little red push buttons sticking up from the
console. He is dancing his fingers over the buttons, tapping out discordant
beeping electronic jingles.

  He is trying to explain to me how his little blue box does nothing less
than place the entire telephone system of the world, satellites, cables and
all, at the service of the blue-box operator, free of charge.

     "That's what it does. Essentially it gives you the power of a super
operator.  You seize a tandem with this top button," he presses the top
button with his index finger and the blue box emits a high-pitched cheep,
"and like that"-cheep goes the aaaa box again-"you control the phone
company's long distance switching systems from your cute little Princess
phone or any old pay phone.  And you've got anonymity.  An operator has to
operate from a definite location: the phone company knows where she is and
what she's doing.  But with your beeper box, once you hop onto a trunk, say
from a Holiday Inn 800 (toll-free) number, they don't know where you are, or
where you're coming from, they don't know how you slipped into their lines
and popped up in that 800 number.  They don't even know anything illegal is
going on. And you can obscure your origins through as many levels as you
like. You can call next door by way of White Plains, then over to Liverpool
by cable and then back here by satellite.  You can call yourself from one pay
phone all the way around the world to a pay phone next to you.  And you get
your dime back too.

    "And they can't trace the calls? They can't charge you?"

     "Not if you do it the right way. But you'll find that the free-call
thing isn't really as exciting at first as the feeling of power you get from
having one of these babies in your hand.  I've watched people when they first
get hold of one of these things and start using it, and discover they can
make connections, set up crisscross and zigzag switching patterns back and
forth accross the world. They hardly talk to the people they finally reach.
They say hello and start thinking of what kind of call to make next.  They
go a little crazy."  He looks down at the neat little package in his palm.
His fingers are still dancing, tapping out beeper patterns.

     "I think it's something to do with how small my models are. There are
lots of blue boxes around, but mine are the smallest and most sophisticated
electronically.  I wish I could show you the prototype we made for our big
syndicate order."

     He sighs.  "We had this order for a thousand beeper boxes from a
syndicate front man in Las Vegas. They use them to place bets coast to coast,
keep lines open for hours, all of which can get expensive if you have to pay.
The deal as a thousand blue boxes for $300 apiece.  Before then we retailed
them for $1500 apiece, but $300,000 in one lump was hard to turn down.  We
had a manufacturing deal worked out in the Philippines. Everything was ready
to go. Anyway, the model I had ready for limited mass production was small
enough to fit inside a flip-top Marlboro box.  It had flush-touch panels for
a keyboard, rather than these unsightly buttons sticking out. Looked just
like a tiny portable radio. In fact I had designed it with a tiny transistor
receiver to get one AM channel so in case the law became suspicious the owner
could switch on the radio part, start snapping his fingers and no one could
tell anything illegal was going on. I thought of everything for this model--I
had it lined with a band of thermite which could be ignited by radio signal
from a tiny button transmitter on your belt, so it could be burned to ashes
instantly in case of a bust.  It was beautiful. A beautiful little machine.
You should have seen the face on these syndicate guys when they came back
after trying it out. They'd hold it in their palm like they never wanted to
let it go, and they'd say, 'I can't believe it.' You probably won't believe
it until you try it."

THE BLUE BOX IS TESTED:  CERTAIN CONNECTIONS ARE MADE

About eleven o'clock two nights later Fraser Lucey has a blue box in the palm
of his left hand and a phone in the palm of his right. His is standing inside
a phone booth next to an isolated shut-down motel off Highway 1.  I am
standing outside the phone booth.

     Fraser likes to show off his blue box for people.  Until a few weeks ago
when Pacific Telephone made a few arrests in his city, Fraser Lucey liked to
bring his blue box ** to parties. It never failed: a few cheeps from his
device and Fraser became the center of attention at the very hippest of
gatherings, playing phone tricks and doing request numbers for hours.  He
began to take orders for his manufacturer in Mexico. He became a dealer.

     Fraser is cautious now about where he shows off his blue box. But he
never gets tired of playing with it.  "It's like the first time every time,"
he tells me.

     Fraser puts a dime in the slot. He listens for a tone and holds the
receiver up to my ear.  I hear the tone.

     Fraser begins describing, with a certain practiced air, what he does
while he does it.

     "I'm dialing an 800 number now. Any 800 number will do.  It's toll free.
Tonight I think I'll use the ------ (he names a well know rent-a-car company)
800 number. Listen it's ringing. Here, you hear it?  Now watch."

     He places the blue box over the mouthpiece of the phone so that the one
silver and twelve black push buttons are facing up toward me.  He presses the
silver button - the one at the top - and I hear that high-pitched beep.

     "Thats 2600 cycles per second to be exact," says Lucey.  "Now, quick,
listen."

     He shoves the earpiece at me. The ringing has vanished.  The line gives
a slight hiccough, there is a sharp buzz, and then nothing but soft white
noise.

     "We're home free now," Lucey tells me, taking back the phone and
applying the blue box to its mouthpiece once again. "We're up on a tandem,
into a long-lines trunk.  Once you're up on a tandem, you can send yourself
anywhere you want to go." He decides to check you London first. He chooses
a certain pay phone located in Waterloo station.  This particular pay phone
is popular with the phone-phreaks network because there are usually people
walking by at all hours who will pick it up and talk for a while.

     He presses the lower left-hand corner button which is marked "KP" on the
face of the box.

     "That's Key Pulse. It tells the tandem were ready to give it
instructions. First I'll punch out KP 182 START, which will slide us into the
overseas sender in White Plains." I hear neat clunk-cheep.  "I think we'll
head over to England by satellite.  Cable is actually faster and the
connection is somewhat better, but I like going by satellite.  So I just
punch out KP Zero 44.  The Zero is supposed to guarantee a satellite
connection and 44 is the country code for England.  Okay . . . we're there.
In Liverpool actually.  Now all I have to do is punch out the London area
code which is 1, and dial up the pay phone.  Here, listen, I've got a ring
now."

     I hear the soft quick purr-purr of a London ring.  Then someone picks
up the phone.  "Hello," says the London voice.

     "Hello, Who's this?" Fraser asks.

     "Hello.  There's actually nobody here.  I just picked this up while I
was passing by.  This is a public phone.  There's no one here to answer
actually."

     "Hello.  Don't hang up.  I'm calling from the United States."

     "Oh.  What is the purpose of the call? This is a public phone you know."


     "Oh. You know. To check out, uh, to find out what's going on in London.
      How is it there?"

     "It's five o'clock in the morning. It's raining now."

     "Oh.  Who are you?"

     The London passerby turns out to be an R.A.F. enlistee on his way back
to the base in Lincolnshire, with a terrible hangover after a thirty-six hour
pass. He and Fraser talk about the rain.  They agree that it's nicer when
it's not raining.  They say good-bye and Fraser hangs up.  His dime returnswith a nice clink.

     "Isn't that far out," he says grinning at me. "London. Like that."

     Fraser squeezes the little blue box affectionately in his palm. "I told
ya this thing is for real. Listen, if you don't mind I'm gonna try this girl
I know in Paris.  I usually give her a call around this time.  It freaks her
out. This time I'll use the ----- (a different rent-a-car company) 800 number
and we'll go by overseas cable 133; 33 is the country code for France, the
1 sends you by cable.  Okay, here we go. . . . Oh damn.  Busy.  Who could she
be talking to at this time?"

     A state police car cruises slowly by the motel. The car does not stop,
but Fraser gets nervous.  We hop back into his car and drive ten miles in the
opposite direction until we reach a Texaco station locked up for the night.
We pull up to a phone booth by the tire pump.  Fraser dashes inside and tries
the Paris number.  It is busy again.

     "I don't understand who she could be talking to. The circuits may be
busy.  It's too bad I haven't learned how to tap into lines overseas with
this thing yet."

    Fraser begins to phreak around, as the phone phreaks say.  He dials a
leading nationwide charge card's 800 number and punches out the tones that
bring him the Time recording in Sydney, Australia.  He beeps up the Weather
recording in Rome, in Italian of course. He calls a friend in Boston and
talks about a certain over the counter stock they are into heavily. He finds
the Paris number busy again.  He calls up "Dial a Disc" in London, and we
listen to "Double Barrell" by David and Anail Collins, the number one hit of
the week in London.  He calls up a dealer of another sort and talks in code.
He calls up Joe Engressia, the original blind phone-phreak genius, and pays
his respects.  There are other calls. Finally Fraser gets through to his
young lady in Paris.  They both agree the circuits must have been busy, and
criticize the Paris telephone system. At two-thirty in the morning Fraser
hangs up, pockets his dime, and drives off, steering with one hand, holding
what he calls his "lovely little blue box" in the other.

YOU CAN CALL LONG DISTANCE FOR LESS THAN YOU THINK

     "You see, a few years ago the phone company made one big mistake,"
Gilbertson explains two days later in his apartment.  "They were careless
enought to let some technical journal publish the actual frequencies used to
create all their multi-frequency tones.  Just a theoretical article some Bell
Telephone Laboratories engineer was doing about switching theory, and he
listed the tones in passing.  AT ----- (a well known technical school) I had
been fooling around with phones for several years before I came across a copy
of the journal in the engineering library.  I ran back to the lab and it took
maybe twelve hours from the time I saw that article to put together the first
working blue box.  It was bigger and clumsier than this little baby, but it
worked."

     It's all there on public record in that technical journal written mainly
by Bell Lab people for other telephone engineers.  Or at least it was public.

"Just try and get a copy of that issue at some engineering school library
now. Bell has had them all red-tagged and withdrawn from circulation,"
Gilbertson tells me.

     "But it's too late now.  It's all public now.  And once they became
public the technology needed to create your own beeper device is within the
range of any twelve-year-old kid, any twelve-year-old blind kid as a matter
of fact. And he can do it in less than the twelve hours it took us. Blind
kids do it all the time.  They can't build anything as precise and compact
as my beeper box, but theirs can do anything mine can do."

     "How?"

     "Okay. About twenty years ago A.T.&T. made a multi-million dollar
decision to operate its entire long-distance switching system on twelve
electronically generated combinations of six master tones. Those are the
tones you sometimes hear in the background after you've dialed a
long-distance number. They decided to use some very simple tones -- the tone
for each number is just two fixed single-frequency tones played
simultaneously to create a certain beat frequency Like 1300 cycles per second
and 900 cycles per second played together give you the tone for digit 5.
Now, what some of these phone phreaks have done is get themselves access to
an electric organ. Any cheap family home entertainment organ. Since the
frequencies are public knowledge now -- one blind phone phreak has even had
them recorded in one of those talking books for the blind -- they just have
to find the musical notes on the organ which correspond to the phone tones.
Then they tape them.  For instance, to get Ma Bell's tone for the number 1,
you press down organ keys F3 and A3 (900 and 700 cycles per second) at the
same time.  To produce the tone for 2 it's F3 and C6 (1100 and 700 c.p.s).
The phone phreaks circulate the whole list of notes so there's no trial and
error anymore."

     He shows me a list of the rest of the phone numbers and the two electric
organ keys that produce them.

     "Actually, you have to record these notes at 3 3/4 inches per second
tape speed and double it to 7 1/2 inches per second when you play them back,
to get the proper tones," he adds.

     "So once you have all the tones recorded, how do you plug them into the
phone system?"

     "Well, they take their organ and their cassette recorder, and start
banging out entire phone numbers in tones on the organ, including country
codes, routing instructions, 'KP' and 'Start' tones. Or, if they don't have
an organ, someone in the phone-phreak network sends them a cassette with all
the tones recorded with a voice saying 'Number one,' then you have the tone,
'Number two,' then the tone and so on. So with two cassette recorders they
can put together a series of phone numbers by switching back and for th from
number to number.  Any idiot in the country with a cheap cassette recorder
can make all the free calls he wants."

     "You mean you just hold the cassette recorder up to the mouthpiece and
switch in a series of beeps you've recorded?  The phone thinks that anything
that makes these tones must be its own equipment?"

     "Right.  As long as you get the frequency within thirty cycles per
second of the phone company's tones, the phone equipment thinks it hears its
own voice talking to it.  The original granddaddy phone phreak was this blind
kid with perfect pitch, Joe Engressia, who used to whistle into the phone.
An operator could tell the difference between his whistle and the phone
company's electronic tone generator, but the phone company's switching
circuit can't tell them apart. The bigger the phone company gets and the
further away from human operators it gets, the more vulnerable it becomes to
all sorts of phone phreaking."

[Continued in part II]